2020 MPA APSA Academy Film Fund Recipient

Bianca Balbuena is the award-winning Philippine-based producer for VIET AND NAM, a collaboration with Vietnamese writer-director, Minh Quy Truong.  A strong and original drama about two miners caught between their love for each other and their conflicting desires for their futures, as they confront the trauma and the ghosts of Vietnam’s past and the uncertainties of the country’s present.  The film’s blend of fiction with fact and the supernatural promises an innovative work of psychological complexity and artistic innovation from a filmmaker who is emerging as an extraordinary figure in Vietnamese cinema.

Writer-director Ridham Janve’s film, THE SACRIFICE.  Risham’s previous film, THE GOLD-LADEN SHEEP AND THE SACRED MOUNTAIN won the Young Cinema Award in the 2019 APSA Awards, and his new film promises to be brilliantly visualised as it plunges in Indian mythology to tell the story of a lone horseman who survives tribal warfare to seek shelter and safety in a mountainous land of wild forests.  His film departs dramatically from conventional historical epics to focus on the universal story of one man’s relationship with a harsh wilderness.

To Annemarie Jacir, writer and director of ALL BEFORE YOU.  Annemarie is a distinguished Palestinian filmmaker, whose 2017 film WAJIB was recipient of a previous grant from the MPA APSA Academy Film Fund and won 36 international awards.  ALL BEFORE YOU tells a story of escalating demands for Palestinian independence in the 1930s when the country was under British control and the world was shifting towards war.  Her treatment expresses strong storylines and a willingness to break free of conventions in exploring little known aspects of cultural and political history.